Sunday, April 3, 2011

GNOME Asia Summit 2011 - Updates

Day 1 and 2 of the Hackfest begun from the Intel's HAL Airport Road office at Bangalore (thanks to Srinivasa for getting it arranged).
I got a surprise on the first day sent to me by Empathy maintainers, Guillaume and Xavier =)

Thank you both for this awing surprise! That was really motivational.

The Hackfest was kick started with a round table deciding upon the tasks to be accomplished during the five day event and ended with a wrap up of the entire day's activities done by each person to analyse the effectiveness and time utilization.

I volunteered to assist with marketing and organizing besides hacking.
In this while I had been trying to get more media contacts for interviewing our delegates and covering the event. Two of them from Linux format whom I contacted about a month ago actually arrived here on April 1. We were able to arrange discounted accommodation for them in the same hotel as where we stayed and they have been doing their job well without bothering anyone during working hours. I was made the newest addition to the GNOME Asia Organizing committee and tried to give my best to the role and provided my point of views and ideas whenever necessary, about possible ways of spreading awareness of GNOME in Asia, keeping the often overlooked facts in mind.

Hats off to the release team for worked really hard and preparing GNOME 3 ready for release ahead of time (not to mention the April Fool's prank was unexpectedly adorable ;) I had been observing the extensive amount of work a release requires and sleepless nights the release team members spent busy writing release notes.

For Empathy, I was able to begin making changes on my hugest branch for persistent chats which involved studying about Webkit and Pango. I followed up with the Usability team for their useful input on the design changes required to be done in Empathy for this and also discussed it with Allan Caeg. I reported and pushed a patch for a small MUC usability patch and with Fred Muller's help, found out two file transfer bugs in Empathy<->Pidgin interaction over which I'll be working soon after this to make him happy!

Before the summit, I got a peppy GNOME 3 T-shirt and Free Software promotional stuff including stickers I decorated my laptop with-

On April 2nd, the first day of the summit, I attended keynotes by Brian Cameron and Vincent Untz and also his next talk on Building GNOME on build service and SUSE studio which contained some notable points for me. After this, I spent some time at the help desks with students new to GNOME and Linux in general and tried to ease their Linux fear clearing their basic doubts about migrating from Windows to any Linux distribution and explaining its benefits. Tried my hands over OpenSUSE for the first time on a demonstration system and learnt about it from Manu Gupta who has been supporting it since over an year now.

Disclaimer: The opinions shared on this blog are mine alone and do not implicitly represent the views of my employer, the GNOME Foundation, Planet FLOSS India, tuxmachines.org or anyone else who has syndicated its content.

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About Her

A proud patriot of India, born in Kanpur and brought up in Lucknow. An Asian bringing GNOME to Asia as a GNOME Asia organizing committee member and a world citizen making it a happier place to live by working on open source software. 2010 onward, a contributor to open source projects. 2012-2014, a member of the GNOME Foundation.

She has always had a strong desire for coding and going with her instincts, currently hacks on Linux Kernel and related tools under the flagship of IBM's Linux Technology Center. She left no chance in life of learning what interests her in terms of computing, be it languages, tools or algorithms. She loves puzzles and creates low-complexity, elegant solutions to any problem. Recent experiments have demonstrated her to be possessing sound public-addressing skills too.

To take a break, she prefers changing her surroundings which provides her an insight about the history, culture and discoveries pertinent to the place and its inhabitants. She has toured a lot of India, covering almost the whole of it, and some places beyond her motherland. Each new place opened to her a whole new world of knowledge and memories inexplicable.